The Golden Age of UFO Sightings?

Has the world of UFOlogy become too commercialised and dominated by sensationalism? That’s certainly the view of forty year old sales representative Harry Cockler following his recent experience with a leading UFO publication. “I was naive enough to believe that my own UFO encounter was interesting enough in itself to be published in the West London Flying Saucer Digest,” he told his local newspaper, The Fulham Pig Breeders’ Gazette. “But when I sent it into them, they got back to me saying that simply seeing a bloke in a silver space suit thumbing a lift on the A4 wasn’t sensational enough by today’s UFO standards. They suggested that I add in some more details, like how I picked him up in my car and we made mad interstellar love in a lay by, that, at the moment of orgasm, teleported me to Venus. When I refused, they pressed me to at least include a bit about him sticking a glowing green finger up my arse, even though it didn’t happen! Obviously, I refused and they declined to run the story.” The incident has left Cockler questioning the veracity of the tales of alien encounters published by the West London Flying Saucer Digest and similar publications. “Damn it, I thought that glimpsing an apparently broken down flying saucer in a wood as I drove past, then seeing the pilot trying to get a lift, was a pretty extraordinary experience,” he laments. “But these days, it seems is isn’t extraordinary enough – it’s all about sex and anal probes these days!”

Veteran UFO researcher Owen Treblutt agrees, contending that Cockler’s experience with the current UFO press is yet more evidence to back up his thesis that the ‘Golden Age’ of UFO sightings is now long behind us. “It just reinforces my belief that as to how much better stories about UFO sightings were in my childhood,” he opines.  “Now, I know that is partly because I was a child at the time, so anything like that seemed weird and unsettling, but it was also because the sightings back then were just more, well, mysterious.” Treblutt has found himself increasingly alienated from the current mainstream of UFO discourse, dominated, as it is, by stories of alien abductions, government conspiracies and cover ups. “It’s all too explicit with far too much detail – it just takes the fun out of it,” he explains. “Back when I was a kid it seemed that the tabloids were full of tales of motorists glimpsing strange-looking craft in their rear view mirrors, or something shiny or brightly lit in woods as they passed by on the road.  All of the sightings back then (and there seemed to be a lot, especially in the ‘silly season’ at the end of summer), were vague and inconclusive without much in the way of concrete evidence, giving your imagination far more room to run riot filling in the details.”

The current obsession with uncovering supposed physical evidence of UFO visitations is something else that Treblutt feels is undermining the credibility of the whole flying saucer community. “Surely the whole point is that we can’t conclusively prove anything, thereby keeping the mystery going,” he says. “Worse than that, though, all of this so-called physical evidence they keep turning up is just embarrassingly bad, quite obviously faked. All it does is undermine their credibility, reinforcing the view of the general public that everyone involved with UFOs are shysters.” He also points out that, back in the ‘Golden Age’ of UFO sightings, there was also physical evidence, but it was of an entirely different order. “I yearn for the days when the only physical ‘evidence’ of alien visitations would be some dubious looking circular burn marks in a field,” he muses.  “Back in the day, the best you’d get in terms of aliens would be a glimpse of someone in a silver spacesuit – sometimes while they were peering through peoples’ windows. Even the supposed photos taken of alien spaceships and their occupants were always satisfyingly mysterious – always out of focus and blurry, taken on grainy film stock from, seemingly, great distances.  In truth, they could have been of anything. But they were just ambiguous enough to pique the public’s interest without making us look complete charlatans.”

Arch sceptic and top UFO debunker Ronald Frugg concurs with much of what Teblutt says, agreeing that modern sightings always seem to be far too detailed and far too numerous. “Every man and his dog seems to have a tale of being abducted by aliens, then subjected to an examination that sounds suspiciously like some kind of masochistic sexual fantasy,” he observes. “All the exclusivity of the experience has gone and the aliens have gone from an amorphous threat to a far too solid bunch of sex offenders. Moreover, too many of these supposed ‘contactees’ nowadays seem to be virtually on first name terms with the aliens.” He also takes issue with the number of ‘experts’ who now seem to be at the forefront of the UFO community. “The time was when UFO experiences happened to ordinary people who stumbled upon supposed alien activity by accident, now there’s an army of alleged ex-government officials lining up to tell us about secret government laboratories dissecting aliens and exploiting alien technology,” he says. “It’s taking the whole thing away from the ordinary man on the street and into the hands of these so-called experts, who come across to any rational person as a bunch of fantasists and cranks.”

Fragg points out the he grew up close to what, at the time, was regarded as the ‘UFO capital’ of the UK – Warminster in Wiltshire. “While the reported phenomena there were numerous, they never seemed to manifest themselves as anything other than mysterious lights in the sky, (the fact that Warminster is in the middle of Salisbury Plain, a major Army training area and is home to the School of Infantry obviously had no bearing on the origin of these lights)”, says the sceptic.  “But in those days, the UFO spotters who regularly descended on Warminster were all enthusiastic amateurs, mildly eccentric characters who would otherwise probably have been bird or plane spotters.”  These days, by contrast, he argues, UFO spotting has become an industry, full of professional ‘UFOlogists’ who carry out ‘research’ into the phenomena and feature in the media.  “That’s the problem – now that there’s money (not to mention fame) to be had in UFOs, the need for actual ‘evidence’ has increased in order to keep interest going,” Fragg says.  “So the encounters also have to be more sensational – all the better for grabbing the attention of the media.  Consequently, all the mystery is gone.  More importantly, the fun of UFOs has gone.”